Land of the Three Towers - 29th-30th Jan 2016

now showing in Bristol

very pleased to have made the soundtrack and written the songs for this hilarious play that's currently selling out every night at the brand new Wardrobe Theatre in Old Market, Bristol.
http://thewardrobetheatre.com/

ghost opera

"ghost opera" is now on tour.
script by Fellswoop & me
music by Josephine & me

more info here

estuary

filmed a minute and thirty eight seconds of the train journey from totnes to exeter I take every morning to rehearsal for Eliza and the Wild Swans. recorded a soundtrack during my lunchbreak.

On Stepmothers

On Stepmothers

Most fairy tales are impossible problems with impossible solutions. They have that in common with the kind of theatre work that I’m interested in.

‘There is nothing in the least childlike about fairy tales,’ says Marina Warner, the novelist and mythographer, in her excellent book From the Beast to the Blonde. Fairy tales are about big, scary horrible problems; they reflect the insecurities that haunt the dark graveyards and enchanted forests of a culture’s unconscious.

Families and homes are a major theme in this. The homeless runaway with a wicked stepmother and passive, gullible father is an inversion of the traditional safe home, loving mother and strong, infallible patriarch. Of course they aren’t a reversal of reality, just of idealism: child abuse is real and has been around for longer than fairy tales. Like many scary stories, these tales are partly a way to express things that are otherwise suppressed.

In an article she wrote for the New York Times, Warner pointed out that a lot of the older versions of fairy tales have the natural parents as the bad guys, abandoning, abusing and sometimes even wanting to eat their children. Romantic editors like the Grimm brothers, however, preferred the stepmother – still essentially a subversive role (another excellent study of fairy tales and fantastical stories, Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy, is subtitled ‘the literature of subversion’) but apparently slightly safer; an external rather than an internal threat to the order of things.

Eliza’s stepmother gives her an impossible problem: she turns Eliza’s brothers into swans. Eliza finds an impossible solution: mutely sewing magical shirts from stinging nettles. Impossible problem plus impossible solution equals fairy tale resolution.

Eliza’s stepmother gives us an impossible problem: how to present an ordinary woman who is also an evil enchantress. We found an impossible solution: give her three heads, four arms and four voices. Impossible problem plus impossible solution equals…

Written for the Eliza and the Wild Swans blog: http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/Eliza/theblog/.

Eliza and the Wild Swans is on at the Bikeshed Theatre in Exeter from the 19th of December 2013 to the 11th of January 2014. For more information and to buy tickets visit http://www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk/whats-on/eliza-and-the-wild-swans/

goodbye psychedelia; hello child soldiers, love letters, self-determination, insemination, shark mutilation...

This is just a quick snapshot of where things are at.

(the Ablutions cast and crew after the last show of the tour, in Chippenham)

Goodbye Ablutions. It was a glorious, strange little tour; probably the show I've felt most personally attached to since way back when we did By the Bog of Cats at university. Lots of amazing reviews, one award, and currently booking our tour next spring.

In the meantime, this is what I'm doing at the moment:

Like Enemies of the State - Be Frank Theatre - a new show about child soldiers in the DRC, based on the playwright's own journey there - on in Stockholm this month and in London in the Autumn; I've just started working on the compositions and sound design.

Touched... Like A Virgin opens in Edinburgh next week. I'm won't be there with it, but my arrangements will be and I'm in the rehearsals this week as Musical Director.

As understudy to their excellent Musical Director/Songwriter, I'm joining Kilter Theatre's The Last Post at Towersey Festival this month.

Kill the Beast's brilliant The Boy Who Kicked Pigs is doing great up at Edinburgh at the moment - great audiences and reviews. It features lots of music by me, with help from Joe Campbell; another work that feels quite close to my heart.

Timezone Theatre's stark, radical take on Taming of the Shrew starts rehearsals this week for their run in London next month. I've just joined them as composer/sound designer.

The Ablutions Diaries

Ablutions by Fellswoop Theatre
Adapted from the novel by Patrick Dewitt
Devised and performed by Eoin Slattery, Fiona Mikel, Harry Humberstone and Ben Osborn.
Directed by Bertrand Lesca.
Music by Ben Osborn.

Touring 2013-2014. These images taken from various diaries, notebooks, etc. The show has filled several.

 

More information at http://fellswooptheatre.com/current/

the boy who kicked pigs returns

Very excited that Kill The Beast's The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, that had an amazing & critically acclaimed initial run in Manchester last year, is coming to London in a matter of weeks to play at the famous Jacksons Lane theatre, before heading up to Edinburgh's Pleasance this summer.

I'm editing the tracks at the moment. The soundtrack was composed primarily on an old casiotone keyboard, which had a gloriously editable sound though produced mad amounts of hiss and kept switching itself off. The score was composed after listening to a lot of old Hammer Horror soundtracks, as well as loads of Bernard Herrmann, who is kind of the master of simple, unresolving diminished melodies and harmonies that swing between disconcerting & lush - I'm always trying to do that...

This was what working on the score back then looked like - note the League of Gentleman box set, their music was another key inspiration -

After watching a runthrough last Sunday, this is what working on it now currently looks like -

You can hear a bit of the music in this teaser trailer - but more importantly, you can see a snippet of the show, which is a really well-written black comedy, created by a group of great performers complimented by fantastic design:

Get your tickets here - http://www.jacksonslane.org.uk/whats-on/event/2013/the-boy-who-kicked-pigs/

Chasing Beckett: tension and sound

As of today I'm starting work on a sound design and pre-recorded score for Chasing Beckett, a dark comedy showing at the London Theatre in New Cross from the 9th to the 14th of October.

It's a very enclosed piece - a hostage situation in a small but classy upstairs flat, and the dialogue between the hostage and the captor.

Reading the script I thought of Hitchcock's Rope - a very different piece but with a similar tension to it. Rope's use of sound is truly inspiring: almost all the sound is diegetic, with the exception of the music at the beginning and end of the film. Within this diegetic sound are key instances of music, most notably a recurring piano piece that one of the main characters plays, Poulenc's Trois Mouvement's Perpetuals. It's a beautiful piece but a very strange one, a mix of constancy and surprise that perfectly reflects the experimental intellectual criminality of the narrative.

Here is Poulenc himself playing it - a little faster than others have interpreted it:

The fact that a character plays a piece that itself is a perfect soundtrack marks a brilliant merging of diegetic and non-diegetic ideas - the effect is to heighten the realism of the performance through stylisation, rather than detract from it. Stylising represented reality in this way - as in expressionist painting, or poetic prose - has the effect of placing sensation and emotion on the same level as image and sound; arguably, the position they occupy in actual perception. The tension between the two characters, the hidden knowledge and secret motivations, the clash between social convention and expectation and a fascistically anti-social acceptance of violence - all become elevated to the conditions of music; no longer replicating or imitating reality but creating it anew; 'all the others translate,' says Auden - taking on musical qualities takes us beyond translation to creation.

There's a brilliant essay on way that music in Rope corresponds to subversive sexuality, Unheard Sexualities.

soundtrack to medical melodrama

Doing some more research for soundtracking Kill The Beast's The Boy Who Kicked Pigs, on at the Lowry in Manchester later this month. Today: the music of medical melodrama -

General Hospital was brought to you by Wizard Room Deodorizer...

newspapers, cops, operas

Queen of Pop

Quote 'Jubilee' at the Box Office for half price tickets, today and tomorrow (June 4th and 5th)
Touched... Like a Virgin
Soho Theatre, Dean St. London
**** The Daily Mirror
**** The Daily Telegraph
**** What's On Stage
**** The Public Reviews

In my dressing room last night

Seriously:

Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, Actress/Designer Sadie Frost, Supermodel Kate Moss.

Obviously I'm not in the picture. Only a matter of time though, right?

(from The Daily Mail)

Touched... Like a Virgin: composing after Madonna

From next Tuesday night onward I'll be performing alongside actress Sadie Frost - a bit of a hero of mine because of this video - and singer Dave Wickenden - of the legendary Four Poofs & Piano, formerly Jonathan Ross's house-band and Edinburgh Fringe stalwarts - at the Soho Theatre in London. The production is a play called Touched... Like a Virgin, by playwright Zoe Lewis, produced by Sally Humphreys Productions.

This is exciting not only for the obvious reasons but also on a personal level: my mother, playwright Marta Emmitt, was Writer-in-Residence at Soho in 2000; her play Cadillac Ranch was performed there. This a place that excited me when I was twelve years old, and now I'm performing there, which for me is the most amazing thing about this.

It's also extremely challenging, not least because the play is about an obsessive Madonna fan and - while it is emphatically not a Madonna musical - it calls for a selection of Madonna's songs to be used as musical interludes, as well as original music to underscore the scenes.

Writing after Madonna is very interesting: if you want to read a really great piece of musicological analysis, try a wikipedia page on a Madonna song (e.g.): you can see how the songs display different styles at different points, how they move between textures and vocal registers, etc. I've been trying to arrange the songs in ways that reflect the various mental states of the protagonist. One challenge is choosing which aspects of the piece I can bring out with the minimal set-up I've got (a loop pedal borrowed from sound artist Sholto Dobie, a glockenspiel borrowed from Sleeping Passengers bassist Will Kerr, an upright piano and an acoustic guitar). While I wouldn't normally do this, I'm putting up a demo I've done - with help from fellow Sleeping Passenger Nina Scott - of Material Girl; I'd be interested to see what people think of it.

belleville notebooks

Dear Diary,

This is me scribbling for Belleville Rendez-vous, about to embark on its haphazard tour.

It is weird. You sit between a couple of instruments and a notebook and you watch things appear around you and in front of you, you scribble everything you can, you're scared to jump in and stick things on top of what you see but you also can't not.

It is so happily frustrating.

Northern Star

so Northern Star is going down in London, and tickets are starting to sell out; it's a beautiful and unusual play, an underperformed gem now dragged out of retirement by Buzz Goodbody Award winning director Caitlin McLeod... and featuring a soundtrack by me and Tegid Cartwright.

More info here
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productionsnorthernstar.htm

get your tickets by clicking the link over there on the right.

further things and furthering things

Paul Klee - obsessed with light and colour, and he used to design the insignias on the wings of planes in the first world war. Biplanes? Hope so.

The Biplane, such as it is, and it kind of isn't - observantly you might have noticed that November is over; the novel isn't over, it's exactly 1/3 finished - but such as it is or isn't, is about Dante's ideas about light, in a way. More on this later... but I think light is quite interesting, well obviously light is quite interesting.

Paul Klee is part of it, pretty much everything is part of it. As a piece of writing, I want it to be like something real rather than fictional, I mean like something that could actually happen even though it is impossible and, worse yet, impossible to explain. It's split roughly into a blog, complete with emoticons, and a third person narrative, occasionally directly addressing the reader, and then footnotes that are from one of the character's diaries. So far there are only two but they are the best things in it.

Anyway I have a few days off from The Wind in the Willows, which is going quite well, there is a lot of music in it, which you can have if you like, but writing is a bit difficult again. So I found some nice things; well a lot of things have helped anyway: China Mieville's blog, which is such great writing and such a great use of the internet, The Fanclub (whose floor I'm sleeping on) being played on Radio 2, a book on Paul Klee I got for £2 in a charity shop including this print

, the discovery this morning that Donald Barthelme, whose writing I only know by hearsay from Will Kerr's song 'Die By The Seaside' which we've been gradually turning into a sleeping passengers track I think, has written about Klee's aeroplane painting job in the war, being introduced to the existence of Blackpool manager Ian Holloway (I know nothing about football, really), reading Dante's Vita Nuova (which does get a bit boring in places but is kind of great), coming back to Josh and Lewis and Alex's flat last night in the cold and dark and discovering that they were watching Iron Man with Iron Man 2 queued...

Dear Diary, how are you?

By the Bog of Cats documentary

Tegid Cartwright, whose E.P. I reviewed on the first day of this blog, has produced a lovely little documentary about By the Bog of Cats..., a play that a group of Warwick students took to the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. I was in the play, and was director of music: I composed a load of themes and then got some awesome musicians (Jenni Mellor, Will Kerr, Tegid himself [though he wasn't playing with us in Scarborough], Oliver Steadman [you might know him better as the bassist from Stornoway], and Rosie Bristow) to rework them, add their own ideas, change things, etc. It did very well there; universally good reviews and a string of awards including the Festgoers Award (voted for by the attendees of the festival as their favourite performance, which it won 'by a landslide') and the Cameron Mackintosh Award for Music in Theatre.

http://tegidcartwright.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/ah-go-on/

The documentary is not completely finished yet, but Teg's put it up on his blog as he wants comments and feedback to help him tweak it.

It's a nice bit of nostalgia for me, but I think it is also quite a nice insight into how music and theatre can be made to work together. It is also extremely embarrassing, and I would like to find a way to avoid filmed interviews in future.

Various theatre projects are in the pipeline, and I'll be posting more about them soon.